Aka the "C is a high level assembler" view. C is not a low level language - https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=321

Aka the "C is a high level assembler" view. C is not a low level language - https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 - argues that this hasn't been true in a long time, since C was ported from the PDP-11. Attempts to model C as being "close to the hardware" are at best misguided and usually hopelessly wrong. It's only possible by delving into the "implementation defined" parts of the spec but even then implementation s are often very bad at precisely defining what their semantics actually are.